Server migration - status, discussion

Per philwareham’s announcement, I intend to use this thread for status reports on site migrations.

To expand on Phil’s post, the overall aim of the server migration is to make things more up-to-date, increase security, performance, and other factors. A lot of the work — most of the work, I hope — has been front-loaded to make the new servers more maintainable, and I’m confident you’ll notice some subtle and not-so-subtle improvements in the coming weeks.

Steps are being taken to minimise any downtime, and also to ensure search engines are informed of relevant URL changes for continuity.

There will be an ‘all done’ announcement at the end, along with a summary blog post, but for now please leave questions below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Re: Server migration - status, discussion

That’s scheduled for later in proceedings, at least a a few days away. That said, it should return a 200 right now because the scaffold is in place, but there’s no content.

Edit: the 500 errors have gone, should be 200 for the root and 404 for everything else until the forum is migrated across.

textpattern.org is loaded without the stylesheet.

Correct. It’s…quite unique behind the scenes. It was running a very old version of Textpattern (was 4.4.1, now 4.7.1) and it has 80+ plugins to go through, many of which are abandoned or superseded by native functions.

I’m hoping it’ll be functional and reasonably pretty before I go to bed tonight.

Re: Server migration - status, discussion

Addendum: I’ve found a couple of interesting bugs/quirks going from 4.4.1 to 4.7.1, too.

Second pair of eyes appreciated on this if you can test it (I’ll attempt to reproduce with fresh eyes soon): 4.4.1 allowed form names beginning . and *, and 4.7.1 doesn’t, so the form names are carried over in the upgrade, but the form content isn’t viewable in the UI. Renaming the form to have a non . or * leading character in the database solves the issue, but there’s a heap of find & replace to do in pages and other forms.

Re: Server migration - status, discussion

I’ve done upgrades form 4.4.1 before and did it slowly in steps, often with some manual edits. But 80+ plugins sounds incredible…

I’ve culled a few that were just not working at all, but here’s the list:

ajw_admin_workflow

ajw_clean_feed

ajw_comments_feed

ako_social

anc_hide

asv_breadcrumb

asv_message

asv_plugin_installer

asv_random_article

asv_recent_comments

asv_tracker

asy_category_tags

asy_wondertag

cbs_gravatar

chh_article_custom

chh_article_lib

chh_related_articles

dca_pop

dru_chatometer

egl_filelist

gbl_blog_stats

gbp_admin_library

gbp_permanent_links

glx_hl_current

glx_if

glx_image

hak_textile_tags

hak_tinymce

ied_hide_in_admin

ied_plugin_composer

mdn_count

mdn_if_custom

mdn_if_section

mem_akismet

mem_self_register

mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount

nko_spamurl_blocker

ob1_googlenav

ob1_if_section

ob1_modified

ptv_if

ras_if_dates

ras_plugin_credits

rei_show_custom

rss_admin_db_manager

rss_admin_quikpik

rss_admin_show_adv_opts

rss_article_edit

rss_auto_excerpt

rss_category_cloud

rss_linkcat_list

rss_live_archive

rss_live_search

rss_suparchive

rsx_request_count

rvm_activity

rvm_admin_articles_trv2

rvm_admin_write_trv2

rvm_article_custom

rvm_css

rvm_if

rvm_maintenance

rvm_plugin_diff

rvm_url_handler_trv2

sgb_error_documents

sgb_url_handler

smd_if

smd_query

smd_where_used

swf_if_empty

tru_tags

wet_slimpattern

wlk_helpful

zem_article_info

zem_cache

zem_contact

zem_contact_lang

zem_contact_reborn

zem_ir

zem_link

zem_nth

Clearly a huge portion of these have been built-in and so are no longer required, and many just aren’t referenced in the code either. So, they’re disabled. I’ve switched to Testing mode, navigate around the site, and enable the plugins that are required to make it (roughly) work, disable the plugins that fail GDPR checks (and the data is purged) and now I’m in the final stretch.

Re: Server migration - status, discussion

.org site looks good from here. Only issue I can spot: Error: The server is missing the specified font '/BAARS.ttf'.

Yeah, loads of those. That’s a side effect of zem_image_replace which uses a TTF to generate a PNG in place of text. There are some issues with the cache directory and the fonts are free for personal use only (oops), so they’re gonna have to go. It’s a 2004-era plugin, it was a different time back then.